18 Sep
2024
18 Sep
'24
3:40 a.m.
[ Of "dd -if" ]
On Mon, 16 Sep 2024, arnold(a)skeeve.com wrote:
I think it was only Plan 9. The change was motivated
by the rc shell,
which treated x=y anywhere on the command line (not just at the
beginning of a command) as a variable assignment.
That is plain broken, but I can see how it could/would work; something
like "A=B blah A=C blah"?
(For a while I used Byron's rc. I was used to
typing
echo ===============
to generate separator lines. rc threw a syntax error at me. :-)
Which is why I've always quoted anything not strictly alphanumeric; you
never know what the current shell will do (especially if it's CSH[*]).
[*]
At a client's office I espied a book on CSH, and said something like "If
there's any book that deserves to be burned, it's one on CSH programming";
pretty much everyone laughed :-)
-- Dave